If conflict erupts in Europe, the first strike won’t be on land, at sea, or in the air. It’ll be in orbit.
At least, that is the assessment of Maj. Gen. Paul Tedman, head of the UK Space Command. Given his line of work, a cynic might dismiss his remark as a bid for relevance. But there is every reason to take him seriously.
Not only does his counterpart in the US, Space Force Chief of Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, call space a ‘warfighting domain’, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 began with a cyberattack against Viasat. Space has become critical infrastructure—and therefore, an attractive target to any hostile power.
The problem: Satellites undergird much of modern life. GPS, weather forecasting, crop monitoring, disaster response, global finance, encrypted communications, terrestrial defence systems—all of these and more depend on hardware in orbit. If a key satellite network were to go down tomorrow, we would be thrown into disorder in minutes.
The resilience of spacecraft, however, is usually set aside to make way for other considerations. Most commercial satellites are designed to be cheap, light, and quick to deploy. But space is not forgiving. It bathes electronics in radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations. And, increasingly, it’s contested. A hostile state power need not destroy an entire constellation to do serious damage. A well-placed strike on just a few satellites would be sufficient.
Historically, space operators sought to avoid the punishing cost and weight of resilient shielding materials, but now, space operators don’t have to concern themselves with justifying the cost. Materials innovation—much of it taking place in European research institutions—has brought down the price and the mass of shielding materials by orders of magnitude, while preserving the materials’ ability to withstand heat, cold, and electromagnetic interference. In other words: low-weight, low-cost, high-strength, EMI-resistant materials are now available.
Culture change: If the issue isn’t technical, then what is the issue? It’s mainly cultural. We are in the habit of putting functionality at the centre of spacecraft design. But the surest way to guarantee robust space infrastructure is to also make resilience a non-negotiable feature of its development. This has been the case for critical terrestrial infrastructure for decades.
There will be those who concede that conditions in space are harsh, but who also say that the threat from hostile powers is overstated. Yes, they might say, we know that a space race is heating up, that alliances and priorities are changing, and that there is more geopolitical unrest than there has been for some time. But is an attack in space really likely? It sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
We’re already there: The brutal truth is that this thinking is naive. Already, hostile powers are able to exploit the difficulty we have tracking spacecraft. It’s only a matter of time before these powers try to use their own satellites not just to gather intel, but photograph our sats so they can steal our technology—before we can react to the problem.
It’s plausible, for example, that hostile actors could block sunlight from reaching the solar panels mounted on our satellites; this action not only cuts off immediate power, but quickly draws down the power supply in the satellites’ batteries, thus preventing the satellites from enduring long spells of celestial darkness.
Further down the line, energy weapons could be used to disrupt satellite systems. Arguably the most disruptive move would be to detonate a nuclear bomb in space, producing an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to mangle the electronics in any satellites nearby.
The bottom line: Once you understand that these outcomes are very possible, and that they would cause chaos here on Earth, it’s easy to see the need for resilience. In Europe, the world leader in materials science, ESA has taken the welcome step of issuing guidance on resilience. But generous and sustained support for materials innovation—across the value chain—is arguably an even better guarantee of robust spacecraft in Europe, and elsewhere. That could mean industry investment, or ESA establishing design requirements.
As it is, more and more spacecraft orbit our planet, largely unshielded against attacks. We protect our power grids, our telecom networks, and our airports. We do this not because we expect this infrastructure to be attacked, but because we can’t afford for infrastructure to fail. This protection has to become the case for space.
Robert Brüll is the CEO of FibreCoat. Retired Air Marshal Andrew Turner, CB, CBE is the cofounder and executive director of Space4Sight.
